About this course

Entry requirements

You should hold a degree or professional qualification. You also need to have successfully completed an accredited counselling training course that:

is at least level 2 Certificate in Counselling Skills

involved at least 30 hours of face-to-face tuition at Level 2 or Level 3 (online courses are not acceptable)

included both theory and practice

took place within the last six years.

Ideally, you will have gained some counselling experience through full- or part-time employment, or through voluntary or pastoral work. You also must have experience of working with people in a helping capacity and access to clients throughout the course. Applicants should normally be at least 25 years of age.

Months of entry

October

Course content

Based on the idea that mental illness is to some extent the result of repressed negative experience, psychodynamic counselling aims to expose the contents of a client's unconscious to make him or her aware of any underlying psychological conflicts.

It prioritises the therapeutic relationship and draws from the work of psychoanalysts such as Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, as well as more contemporary thinkers such as Lacan, Bowlby, Kohut, Mitchell and Benjamin.

The PGDip teaches models of both long-and short-term counselling, the second of which is particularly relevant to NHS work and employee counselling schemes. It stresses the importance of developing counselling awareness through practice in workshops and provides a sound theoretical foundation to the psychodynamic approach.

The course is accredited by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and therefore recognised as preparing students for work as a professional counsellor. The university itself is an organisational member of the BACP as well as the Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association (UCPA).